I was recently diagnosed with a cascading dissociative disorder that causes retrograde amnesia in addition to an existing case of possible anterograde amnesia. Many people have tried to remind me of how great a programmer I was before -- Right now I get the concepts and the idioms, but I want to teach myself whether I know or not. I think I can overcome the amnesia problems in part with it.
My question for you, stackoverflow, is this: I recently found Clojure and it... it feels good to use, even in just copying down the examples from whatever webpage I can find. My goals in learning a functional programming language are to create a simple webserver, an irc AI bot of some variety, and a couchdb-like database system, all of which lightweight and specifically for education. What flaws does Clojure have? Is there a better functional programming language to use right now for education /and/ application?
I think Clojure is a very nice language. If I should point to any defect it is that it's very new, and even though the language seems very mature and production ready, the tools and frameworks around it aren't. So if you are going to make, for instance, a web-app, don't expect to fire three commands and have a "Your first web app is running, now read this documentation to create your models"-page on your browser.
There aren't that many libraries written in Clojure yet either, but that's not a huge problem if you consider that you can use almost anything written in Java.
Haskell currently has a large following and a growing base of libraries and applications. It's also used for education and research. I find it a very nice language to use.
Haskell, Erlang and Clojure are all good choices. I would personally recommend Clojure, you might be able to do some interesting database stuff with the Software Transational Memory system that is part of Clojure.
You list CouchDB in your question, and it's written in Erlang, which is meant to be a pretty engrossing language once you get into it.
I have no personal experience with Clojure, but i really recommend F#. It's quite a powerful language in the style of OCaml. I really like it because it's debugging tools and IDE are second to none, and you can take advantage of practically every library on the (huge) .NET platform.
Related
I am new to programming and would like to create a chatbot(I know a little about arithmetic, statistic, linear algebra but no knowledge yet in ML/DL/AI theory. And as I'm starting, I haven't done any projects yet. But the final goal I set myself is to be able to create a chatbot with artificial intelligence. But after some research, I saw that it will take me quite a long time.
So I set myself an intermediate level. One just to create a chatbot that can send and reply to messages automatically. To this end, the programming languages that have been recommended to me are: Python, Ruby, PhP, Java... but (in view of my final objective : creating a chatbot with AI) I would like to know which programming language will be more useful and more appropriate for me?
[RE]: Given my situation, I haven't started a project yet (I'm looking for the right language to be able to get started). Yes, I know I'm repeating myself but that's why I can't present a community-specific problem. Besides since I just learned that my question is a matter of opinion and that it does not respect the rules of the platform, I humbly ask the moderators to remove it.
Thanks !
Hey that’s an interesting project to do.
As you are more focused on the artificial intelligence I would stick with the biggest and most common ML language:
Python - this is currently the biggest Machine Learning language and allows you to use open source tensorflow for your ML models.
I think what you will find interesting and challenging, once you go into more complex sentences is dealing with natural language processing, Python has the nltk (Natural Language Toolkit) that’s a good place to start and learn from.
Once you have gotten a possible basic python console chat system working you might want to show it off in a nicer presented way so more so you could wrap it in a simple python api and call upon it using a small JavaScript web browser chat application. Although your more interested in the first part so I’d suggest go with python.
I’d start off by trying to make the ai respond to predefined strings and then go from there. It’s worth nothing there is a number of open-source GitHub projects that have ML and Natural Language Processing bots so have a little look around for inspiration. https://github.com/topics/chatbot
Also fyi if your writing a report on this doing detailed investigative work in what tooling and language to use is an important part of your report and you should gather information and sources about usage etc and then reason as to why.
Hope this points you in the correct direction and good luck 👍
I have been playing a MUD game now off and on for over a year. I have scoured the internet looking for the best computer language to learn to develop my own. So far, I have come up with nothing but C. Is C the best language to learn for this application, or is there something better?
I know SMAUG was written in C, but that was years ago. I am new to programming in general and have some experience with Python. I have been playing Aardwolf, which allows it users (after a certain level) to create their own area's. The user does this using Lua. This was interesting to me, because Lua is a "scripting" language. So this begs another question - Do you build the game's format in C (or something else) but create the world with a script?
Also, this would be a game with only my friends, so a direct connection would be required since I would not be hosting it online. So, once again, I would like to dive into this world and use this as a pet project to also help me learn a programming language... but which one would be the best that would also allow me to scale it uo in the funture
P.S. - Any open source code out there that I can look at and study?
So, once again, I would like to dive into this world and use this as a pet project to also help me learn a programming language... but which one would be the best that would also allow me to scale it uo in the future
Most MUD codebases tend to be in C, but this is mainly for historical reasons. MUDs were fairly popular a while back, and at the time, C was by far the best language for portability which was supported by most hosting options out there.
That being said, a MUD is really fairly simple, in many ways. You could easily write a MUD in any language, provided it supports sockets and text parsing. Using a language with a good string parsing and high level socket support would actually be far simpler than some of the classic MUD code bases.
There are a ton of available MUD engines available online : a quick look at MudConnector will give you a ton info of available servers, software and code bases.
As for your programming language of choice, if you intend on only making it available to you and your friends, Python would be fine - I made one entirely in Lua a few years ago and it was a breeze. It's a great learning experience !
perhaps you should look for a MUDOS
http://www.mudos.org/
now we are working in one project.in that project we choosed HTML5 and CSS3 designed. but still we have confuse on server side scripting, whether php,ruby,python,scala,and more and more..our requirements is nothing but
SERVER SCRIPTING LANGUAGE:our server side scripting language is secure and more helpfull(ease of development,security,maintenance) in anystage. can you please suggest me which is good at present(21-10-10)? sorry if this question is make argument...
and can you say which is current trend in web development language...not ask about which language...but which trend(first functional programming to oops concepts...is still oops concepts or we switched to any recent trend? )
and i heard by using proper oops class structure with any language we can enhance security? is it true?
i searched lot and lot more than 1 week. but still confuse...
DATABASE: still confuse on which data base is best for us?
sorry to everyone if my question make hurt or make more discussion? and thanks to everyone...
It depends on the complexity of applications, performance requirements, target audience (corporate intranet, internet,...) and budget.
If you can give more details on these then you might get a better suited answer and not a very general one (like this)
And more importantly in which technology you and your team are comfortable with. A Java project and PHP project's success, in completion and performance is more on the team's experience and expertise than on the language itself, to a great extent.
See also these questions: (php vs python) scalability, PHP and Java performance and scalability comparison, and this article by Joel.
Ok, you asked about security:
It is the application architecture and code that decides security at the end of the day, not the language itself.
OOP is a nice paragdim to code, makes developemnt and maintenance (arguably)easier, but end of the day, it is how you implement it, what your architecture is, and how good you coding practices are.
OOP alone will not make your site secure. Nor will the use of any particular language or OS or framework. Only good practices will help you, and most of those apply regardless of paradigm, language, or platform.
As for language popularity, PHP, Python, and Ruby (on Rails) seem pretty popular. As do .net languages, particularly C#. Don't mistake "popular" for "good" or especially "secure", though -- you need to evaluate the languages for yourself, and don't trust what some random geek on the intarwebz tells you, as we're not the ones who'll have to build stuff with it. And above all, follow the best practices for the language/framework you choose, or any benefits it claims to offer will likely be null and void.
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What is the best programming language for artificial intelligence purposes?
Mind that using suggested language I must be able to employ any AI technique (or at least most of them).
All the cool bearded gurus in what's left of AI research use Lisp :)
There are two big camps: Common Lisp and Scheme. They have different syntax, etc. Lots of good stuff written for both.
Java is a very popular all-purpose language but a lot of the interesting stuff in AI / Functional Programming, such as passing closures as first-order objects, is clumsy to do in Java.
My personal preference would be to stay away from Windowsy languages like C# and F#. Cool people develop under Unix. Or Linux if they're cool but poor.
Some cool but weird people program in Haskell. A reasonably modern FP language with good performance. I tried it once, it made my brain hurt; but you might be smarter than I am.
UPDATE: Answers to Steve's questions.
I wouldn't be the one paying for a Unix variant; that's what corporations and research institutes do. The idea is, you want to be doing AI research for an outfit that sinks millions into their hardware and doesn't balk at paying a few thousand for an operating system. That's the kind of outfit likely to have good food in the cafeteria and/or pay well for doing fun work. But I'm certainly not knocking Linux.
F# may be cool but I see a whole raft of issues getting it to run on Linux or any other Unix (that's what I meant by "windowsy"), and I don't want to work under Windows (that's what I meant by "personal preference").
To elaborate on the "windowsy" theme: You mention that F# is an OCaml variant. From my own admittedly brief research, it seems that F# is missing functors, OCaml-style objects, polymorphic variants and the camlp4 preprocessor. A functional language without functors? Really? If one were disposed to not like Microsoft, as I admittedly am, one could conclude that they had gone ahead and crowbarred a perfectly good functional language, OCaml, into something they could get to run in their CLR so they could claim to "have" a functional language. Finally, because I don't suspect, I know that Microsoft always prioritizes market dominance over product quality, I don't plan to touch F#. But this is my personal preference, and clearly identified as such, while we're really more concerned with making a good recommendation for mary.ja45 .
I have better reasons to recommend Lisp over F# and even OCaml and Haskell. These are mostly based on the historic preponderance of Lisp over any other language in the AI field.
The bulk of AI literature is based on programs written in Lisp or Prolog. If nothing else, good knowledge of Lisp would allow a student to understand the sample programs. My personal favorite AI megaproject, Cyc, has runtimes in your choice of Common Lisp or C.
In the TIOBE index of programming language (as seen and used in industry), Lisp takes 15th place while Haskell takes 43rd and F# and OCaml place below 50th. Presence on the market correlates with employment opportunities, naturally.
That said, it's quite possible that a number of the younger "AI interesting" languages are poised to skyrocket. If some major research institute published some groundbreaking, defining-the-field research in, say, Scala, you'd see Scala's popularity advance sharply in the research community and, with some lag, in industry.
I (obviously) can't comment on F#'s other qualities but you're as welcome to make recommendations as I was.
Python seems to be used a lot in the general scientific community. It has a lot of libraries available and it's easy to learn.
I'll throw Scala into the pot.
it's usable for functional programming
it can be made as fast as Java
it's a modern language with lot's of nice aspects
Java seems to be a bit popular in AI, too and so you can use all those Java libraries from Scala
I've solved all exercises from a basic AI course in Scala. It worked really well.
If by "all of AI" you also mean machine learning, which I guess, Matlab, R and Python+Scipy should definately be mentioned.
I personally use Clojure for AI programming, and have found it to be a great all-rounder AI language.
Reasons:
It's a Lisp, and Lisps have historically been very strong the the AI field
It's a homoiconic language with powerful macros, so great for code generation and genetic programming. This is a surprisingly useful property for AI programming (and possibly explains some of the success of Lisp in general in this space)
It runs on the JVM and can easily access all the Java libraries for number crunching (Weka, Colt, etc.).
It's good for rapid interactive development - it's very dynamic and you can do pretty much everything interactively in a running Clojure REPL. No need for recompiling etc.
It matters probably whether the programming environment is academic or not, but for most non-academic AI application development I would recommend sticking with a mainstream language like Java or C++. One needs to be able to interface readily with other COTS or open-source software packages, and this can sometimes be difficult or impossible in more "exotic" languages. For academic work this may be a less critical issue.
Additionally, performance can be important for many applications, and mainstream languages generally have the most heavily-optimized compilers, e.g., C++ or Java.
It is true that functional programming languages like LISP, Scheme, etc have specialized features that may make it easier to implement particular AI methods, but I do not believe this to be true for AI-related programming as a whole, e.g., quantitative machine learning methods usually don't require a functional language. If you need access to both functional constructs and general software packages, there are some tools for LISP to help with this, and the recently-developed Clojure is a LISP-variant that runs on the JVM and can access Java libraries. Also, Groovy is another JVM-based language that includes support for closures.
Lastly, some programmers like paradigm flexibility and/or fast prototyping for AI projects. Ruby and Python both see some AI-related usage for this reason as multi-paradigm languages that can also be used for scripting.
Like most things in programming, the best answer for which language to use in AI development will ultimately depend on the needs of your projects.
It really depends on what kind of problem you are looking at. Also, how "deep" you want to go into AI stuff. If you want to learn from the basics and just implement theoretical AI stuff, go with a higher level language-- as in functional programming (and proven in AI) like lisp, or prolog. If you know what problem set you are dealing with and want efficient, go with something like Java, C++ and use a toolkit to do the stuff.
Since you mention Machine Learning look into Weka Toolkit in Java for some of these stuff.
Pick the programming language with AI techniques the same way you pick a language for any other project:
What is the problem you are trying to
solve?
Is there good support available for
the language?
What are the customers requirements?
I would recommend Prolog as a very good programming language used to implement AI systems.
There is no "best" language. Each one has its merits. When I studied AI, mostly we worked with lisp and prolog, but I've been most productive in AI with Java/C# and F# has a lot to offer.
How about a framework written in Java, supporting "High Level Logic" and agent style communication.
http://highlevellogic.blogspot.com/2010/11/when-will-we-have-artificial.html
It also depends on the size of your dataset. For web-scale datasets you may want to use Map-Reduce and that implies Hadoop. Hadoop is in Java -- but you could use any language (Python, etc.) for your Map-Reduce functions.
There is also a java framework called weka, developped by the university of waikato. I don't know wether it anwsers your question, but it may help.
Quoting wikipedia: «Weka supports several standard data mining tasks, more specifically, data preprocessing, clustering, classification, regression, visualization» and more.
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When Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood began the disagreement in their podcast over whether programmers should learn C, regardless of their industry and platform of delivery, it sparkled quite an explosive debate within the developer community that probably still rages amongst certain groups today. I have been reading a number of passages from a number of programmer bloggers with their take on the matter. The arguments from both sides certainly carry weight, both what I did not find is a perspective that is uniquely angled from the standpoint of developers focused on just the .NET Framework. Practically all of them were commenting on a general programmer standpoint.
What am I trying to get at? Recall Jeff Atwood's opinion that most of the time developers at such high levels would spend would be on learning the business/domain, on top of whatever is needed to learn the technologies to achieve those domain requirements. In my working experience that is a very accurate description of the work life of many. Now supposing that .NET developers can fork the time for "extra curricular" learning, should that be C?
For the record, I have learnt C back in school myself, and I can absolutely understand and appreciate what the proponents are reasoning for. But, when thinking things through, I personally feel .NET developers should not dive straight into C. Because, the thing I wish more developers would take some time to learn is - MSIL and CLR.
Maybe I am stuck with the an unusual bunch of colleagues, I don't know, but it seems to me many people do not keep a conscious awareness that their C# or VB code compiles in IL first before JIT comes in and makes it raw machine code. Most do not know IL, and have no interest in how exactly the CLR handles the code they write. Reading Jeffrey Richter's CLR via C# was quite a shocker for me in so many areas; glad I read it despite colleagues dismissing it as "too low level". I am no expert in IL but with knowledge of the basics, I found myself following his text easier as I was already familiar with the stack behaviour of IL. I find myself disassembling assemblies to have a look at how the IL turns out when I write certain code.
I learn the CLR and MSIL because I know that is the direct layer below me. The layer that allows me to carry out my own layer of work. C, is actually further down. Closer to our "reality" is the CLR and MSIL. That is why I would recommend others to have a go at those, because I do not see enough folks delving at that layer. Or, is your team already all conversant with MSIL?
Of course you should. The greatest way to become overly specialized and single-minded (and, correspondingly, have limited marketable skills) is to only work with a single type of language and eschew all others as "not related to your current task."
Every programmer should have some experience with a modern JIT'd OO language (C#/Java), a lower-level simpler language (C, FORTRAN, etc), a very high level interpreted language (Python, Ruby, etc), and a functional language (Scheme, Lisp, Haskell, etc). Even if you don't use all of them on a day-to-day basis, the broadening of your thought process that such knowledge grants is quite useful.
I already know C and that helped me during the 1.1 days where there are a lot of things that are not yet in the .NET base libraries and I have to P/Invoke something from the Platform SDK.
My take is that we should always allocate a time for learning something that we don't know yet. To answer your question, I don't think it is essential for you to learn C but if you have some time to spare, C is a good language to learn and is just as valid as any other language out there.
True, C is way below the chain. Knowing MSIL can help devs understand how to optimise their apps better. As for learning C or MSIL, why not both? :)
.NET developers should learn about the CLR. But they should also learn C. I don't see how anybody can really understand how the CLR works without some low-level understanding of what happens on the bare metal.
Spending time learning about higher-level concepts is certainly beneficial, but if you concentrate too much on the high-level at the expense of the low-level, you risk becoming one of those "architect" people who can draw boxes and lines on whiteboards but who are unable to write any actual code.
What you learn by learning C will be useful for the remainder of your career. What you learn about the CLR will become obsolete as Microsoft changes their platform.
My take is that learning some compiled language and assembly is a must. Without that, you will not get the versatility required to switch between languages and stacks.
To be more specific -- I think that any good/great programmer must know these things by direct experience:
What is the difference between a register and a variable?
What is DMA?
How is a pixel put on the screen (at low level)?
What are interrupts?
...
Knowing these things is the difference between working with a system you understand and a system that, for all you know, works by magic. :)
To address some comments
You end up having two different kinds of developers:
people that can do one thing in 10 ways in one or two languages
people that can do one thing in one or two ways in 10 different languages
I strongly think that the second group are the better developers overall.
I think of it like this:
Programmers should probably be actually working in the highest-level language appropriate. What's appropriate depends on your scenario. A device driver or embedded system is in a different class from a CRUD desktop app or web page.
You want your programmers to have as much practice as possible in the language in which they are working.
Since most programmers end up working on generic desktop and web apps, you want programming students to move into the higher level languages as soon as possible during school.
However, the higher-level languages obfuscate a few basic programming problems, like pointers. If we apply our principle of using what's appropriate to students as well, those higher level languages may not be appropriate for first year students. That throws out Java, .Net, Python, and many others.
So students should use C (or better yet: C++ since it's "higher-level" and covers most of the same concepts) for the first year or two of school to cover basic concepts, but quickly move up to a higher-level language to enable more difficult programs earlier.
To be sufficiently advanced in writing C#, you need to understand the concepts in C, even if you don't learn the language proper.
More generally though, if you're serious about any skill, you should know what goes on at least one abstraction level below your primary working level.
Coding in jQuery should be paired with an understanding of JavaScript
Designing circuits necessitates knowing physics
Any good basketball player will learn about muscles, bones, and nutrition
A violinist will learn about the interplay of rosin, friction, bow hairs, string, and wood dryness
I like to learn a new language every year. Not necessarily to master it, but to force my brain to think in different ways.
I feel learning C is a good language to learn about low level concepts without the pain of coding in assembly.
However I feel that learning lessons from languages like Haskell, python, and even arguably regex (not exactly a language, but you catch my drift?) is as important as the lessons to be gleaned from C.
So I say, learn about the CLR and MSIL on the job if thats your area, and in your spare time, try picking up a different language once every so often. If that happens to be C this year, good for you and enjoy playing with pointers ;)
I don't see any reason why they should. Languages like Java and C# were designed so that you needn't worry about the low-level details. That's the same like asking whether a WinForms developer should spend time learning the Win32 API because that's whats happening underneath.
While it doesn't hurt to learn it, you'd probably gain more from spending more time learning the languages and platforms you are familiar with, unless there's a good need to learn the low-level technical details.
It can't be a bad idea to learn MSIL, but in a way it's just another .NET language, but with nasty syntax. It is another layer down, though, and I think people should have at least some vague understanding of all the layers.
C, being somewhat like assembly language with nicer syntax, is a nice way to get an idea of what's happening on quite a low level (although some things are still hidden from you).
And from the other end, I think everyone should know a bit of something like Haskell or Lisp to get an idea of higher-level stuff (and see some of the ideas being introduced in C# 3 in a cleaner form)
If you consider yourself a programmer, I would say yes, learn C.
Many people who write code do not consider themselves programmers. I write .NET apps maybe 3 hours a day at work, but I don't label myself a "programmer." I do a lot of things that have nothing to do with programming.
If you spend your whole day programming or thinking about programming, and you are going to make your entire career revolve arround programming, then you better be sure you know your stuff. Learning C would probably help build a base of knowledge that would be helpful if you're going to go very deep in programming skills.
With everthing, there are trade-offs. The more languages you learn, and the more time you spend dedicated to technology, the less time you have for learning other skills. For example, would it be better to learn C, or read books on project management? It depends on your goals. You want to be the best programmer EVAR? Learn C. Spend hours and hours writing code and dedicating yourself to the craft. You ever want to manage somebody else instead of coding all day? Use the time you would put into programming and find ways to improve your soft skills.
Should .net developers be learning C? I would say "not necessarily," but we should always be dabbling in some language outside of our professional bailiwick because every language brings with it a new way of thinking about problems. During my professional career as a .net (and before that, VB 2-6) developer, I've written small projects in Pascal, LISP, C, C++, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, and Python and am currently dabbling in Lua and Perl.
Other than C++, I don't list any of them on my resume because I'm not looking to be a professional in any of them. Instead, I bring back interesting ideas from each of them to use in my .net-based work.
C is interesting in that it really gets you close to the OS, but that's hardly the only level you need to know about to be a good programmer.
The CLR is a virtual machine so if that's all you learn, then you only know what's happening at a virtual level.
Learning C will teach you more about the physical machine as far as memory usage goes, which as you mention is what the CLR uses underneath. Learning how the CLR works isn't going to give you as much insight into, say, garbage collection, as learning C. With C, you really appreciate what's involved in memory management.
Learning CIL on the other hand, tells you a bit more about execution in .NET than you would by learning C. Still, how IL maps to machine language will still be a mystery for the most part so knowing some of the high-level opcodes, like the ones for casting types, isn't that helpful in terms of understanding what's really going on as they're opaque for the most part. Learning C and pointers, however, will enlighten you on some of those aspects.
Is the issue learning C or MSIL, or is it more fundamental? I'd say that in general, more developers could stand to learn more about how computers, physical or virtual, work. A person can get to be a fairly competent programmer by only understanding a language and API in a box. To take the profession to the next level, I feel that developers really need to understand the whole stack. Not necessarily in detail, but in sufficient generality to help solve problems.
A lot of these skills are being talked about here can be acquired by learning more about compilers and language design. You probably need to learn C to do this (whoops, sneaky), but compiler writing is a great context to learn C in. Steve Yegge talks about this on his blog, and I largely agree with him on this point. My compiler writing course in university was one of the most eye opening courses I've ever taken, and I really wish it had been a 200 level course, instead of a 400 level one.
I posted this on another thread but it applies here to:
I believe you need a good foundation, but devote most of your time to learning what you will be using.
Learn enough assembler to add two numbers together and display the result on a console. You'll have a much better understanding of what is actually going on with the computer and it will make sense as to why we use binary/Hex. (this can be done in a day and can be done with debug from cmd.exe).
Learn enough C to have to allocate some memory and use pointers. A simple linked list is sufficient. (this can be done in a day or two).
Spend more time learning a language that you are going to use. I would let your interests steer you into which language (C#, Java, Ruby, Python, etc.).